Olympic games are financed by the contributions of the sports fans who give either at athletic contests or through organizations with which they are affiliated. So far this year the H.A.A. has collected $650 to be contributed toward the general Olympic fund allocated by the executive committee. On the back of this year's Yale game ticket application is a request for money for Harvard's contribution to the games.

"We feel the contributions ought to be voluntary," Bingham says, "and therefore we are not adding a percentage to the tickets as is being done at some athletic contests. In other Olympic games this has worked quite satisfactorily; in fact we had contributed $1000 to the 1940 Olympic preliminaries before the games were officially called off."

There are opportunities for other teams which may have hopes of winning olive wreaths and oak trees but unfortunately not too bright ones. America's major sports--football, baseball and basketball--gain rather minor positions in Olympics. Football, as the U. S. plays it, is popular in no other nation and although there has been talk of sending an exhibition team, it is unlikely. An exhibition baseball team usually travels to the Olympic games and in 1948 there may be some other nations to play it. If there are and the executive committee decides to send one, the players would be picked individually through regional tryouts. America always wins the Olympic basketball crown by a top-heavy margin, but apparently Europe wants to try again this year and a team will be sent probably picked from the squads who make the finals of the New York Garden tournaments this winter.

America's soccer team, which very seldom has gone anywhere in world competition, is picked in regional tryouts similar to those of baseball. The best men in the regionals then go to the finals--in 1936 it was in Brooklyn--when the final squad is picked and a couple of weeks then remain for the coaches to make the players into a team. In 1936 Andrew Guyda, the Crimson Freshman soccer coach, played wing and halfback for the American team which lost to India, the squad which eventually copped the world title.

Olympians on Skates

Hockey has generated considerable world interest for the past 40 years and the U. S. A. sends an amateur team to the Olympics every leap year, more as a gesture than anything else, for it usually is promptly beaten by Canada or one of the Scandinavian countries. The hockey representatives will probably be picked as a team, at least the nucleus will, and should the Crimson some up with an unusually good season, as far as the H.A.A. is concerned, it would be eligible to enter the regional tryouts. Sports such as skiing and rifle are, of course, worked on an individual basis.

Swimming is the last sport which could conceivably produce a Harvard Olympic representative, but on the basis of times last year it will not. In 1936, however, a Harvard swimmer did go to Germany. Charles G. Hutter, Jr. swam every heat in the 800 meters free style but the final one in which Robert Kiphuth, the Olympic coach for 1936 and Yale's mentor, substituted Yale's John Macionis for him.

The next winter in New Haven Hutter and Macionis swam against each other in the Harvard-Yale meet and Hutter reared to a length and a half victory, thereby leading the Crimson team to its first victory over a Yale swimming team in 13 years. "That was one of the greatest thrills I've ever had in sports." William Bingham says.